Last week I spoke to the lovely Karen Gryst of Connecting Up Australia, an organisation which works to connect NGOs through technology. They’re also Microsoft’s most successful distributor of products to NGOs, offering a variety of software and hardware at special rates.

In Karen’s view, video is going to be the best medium for NFPs to get their message across online in the future.

Why?

It’s easy to relate to – it shows issues in a tangible way.

It’s getting cheaper and easier to produce.

Distribution to a wide audience costs nothing.

There’s a lot of case studies, mostly coming out of the US, of how videos are becoming a dominant storytelling medium for various causes. Some great technology I didn’t know about is the flip, a small portable video camera from Cisco that plugs straight into a computer. With developments like that, video will become even more accessible than it is today.

The issue for me is how videos with a cause are going to stand out from the clutter. What do we do when ‘not another picture of a starving African child’ is replaced with ‘not another video competition with a cause’?

Connecting Up recently ran their annual conference (that I wish I could have attended) including Beth Kanter, Cheryl Kernot, Tracey Fellows (Microsoft), Peter Deitz (Social Actions), Alan Noble (Google) and Monique Potts (ABC). (To see what happened at the conference, look for the social media tag cua09 on Twitter and Flickr or check out highlights on the conference website.)

They also have annual awards for best case practices in technology in the NGO sector. If you know of any Australian NGOs utilising technology or social media in innovative ways, make sure they enter!